„Activation of key terminology“, „memorising“ or „vocab learning“ – no matter what you call it, the fundamentals of terminology just need to be there in your brain (and not only on paper/hard disk). You can print lists or make flashcards or use one of those many apps and programs to learn your words (Anki, Phase 6, Langenscheidt and Pons was what colleagues mentioned spontaneously, InterpretBank also has a learning module), but none of these have made their way into my daily routine as an interpreter so far, basically because I couldn’t be bothered to sit down and study my vocab … I would rather listen to one of my talking glossaries and hope that the words would somehow find their way into my memory.

So I was all the more intrigued by a learning app that I read about some time ago in several magazines and blogs: Semper is a proactive and pushy little fellow who asks you impertinent vocab questions each time you unblock your smartphone screen. Real microlearning, actually: tiny memorising units dispersed over the day in changing contexts are much more effective than long learning sessions at one place. I quite liked the idea and installed Semper on my Android phone straightaway. After searching the vast amount of available „packs“ (virtual stacks or decks of flashcards), it was clear to me that I wanted my own pack, so I opened my desktop browser and logged on at www.getsemper.com (preferably do this with your Google account if you have one) and a few clicks later I had created my first pack.

In order to fill this pack with life (i.e. weird words to learn), to my great surprise I was brought to a quite familiar place: GoogleSheets. A Semper „pack“ is just that: A Google sheet with an add-on called PackCreator –which comes in quite handy, with shared Google glossaries becoming rather fashionable these days.

So all I had to do was copy & paste a word list from my own database into the columns, click „publish“ and off it went. A few minutes or even seconds later my brand new pack arrived in the Semper app on my mobile phone. And I can also still find it in my personal GoogleDrive (under „recent“), which makes it very easy to modify and put in the latest vocab for the next job.

I enjoyed myself so much that I not only created one Spanish-German pack with all those words that always take me just a second too long to recall but also an English-German one containing the EU waste nomenclature (taken from regulation 2150/2002). And now each time I unlock the screen of my phone I will be tested infallibly on waste categories, chemicals or weird insects in one of my working languages.

As to the testing mode, I personally prefer the „Flashcard“ mode from the „Multiple Choice“ one, but I suppose that’s a matter of personal preference.

If you open your pack and look at the elements in detail, you will even find a very charming audio output feature (click on the speaker symbol).

You can also choose if you only wish to be tested when unlocking your screen („Lockscreen“) or also when you open certain apps („Loadscreen“). My self-experiment has been on for about 48 hours now, and although it only took me 10 minutes to find out that the loadscreen function would drive me completely insane, I am still delighted to answer Semper’s questions each time I unlock my phone. We’ll speak again in a month …

————————–About the author:
Anja Rütten is a freelance conference interpreter for German (A), Spanish (B), English (C) and French (C) based in Düsseldorf, Germany. She has specialised in knowledge management since the mid-1990s.